Monday, February 20, 2017

Light Tutorialization

Just a small update this week. I mostly just built a level that forces players to navigate a maze. It appears within the first few levels of the game so that more people will realize that they can move about without charging everywhere they go. It was the number one issue with the game in the last playtest, so it's important that this level properly communicate to the player.

That being said, I ended up pulling back a bit on how directly I spoke with the player here. I created an object that reveals text as you charge. Once charging reveals the first bit of text, you really want to see the entire message. But when you reveal the last bit, you see that the message actually is trying to teach you NOT to charge. It's a little playful this way, and even though it seems counterintuitive, I think the way it asks the player to charge to reveal its text actually makes its message more effective. Here's what it looks like:

The problem is that I don't want to test this system without first testing the level without this tutorial text. If the level on its own teaches people what I want them to learn, then I don't want to introduce tutorial text into the mix. There's an outside chance I can make this game without any tutorial at all (outside of the instructions menu).

Next week I'm going to continue to revise the beginning of the game. Specifically, I want to see if I can introduce switches and kill walls way earlier.

As always, the charging-up noise is by Javier Zumer. I use and modify it under this license.

EDIT: Whoops! I actually left that tutorial feature in, and I wasn't unsubscribing from events correctly, which causes a huge bug! Fixed that now. And I figured I'd leave the tutorial feature in.